Upgrading Your 17" MBP Hard Drive? (FYI/Review)

Greetings!
I'm not sure if this has been mentioned, but I wanted to give a heads-up to anyone who might be replacing their hard drive in a 17" MBP...
Mine is 15 months old. I read all of the posts, and reviewed all of the online instructions for replacing the drive. Overall, the process was pretty routine. However, there was one surprise to be aware of, that I did not find in any of the material I read or reviewed...
When I got to the point of removing the actual drive, I was surprised to find the design of my MBP differed from others shown in the various online instructions I reviewed. As the general instructions go, you simply need to remove the two screws/rubber mounts on the right side of the drive, gently slide it out, disconnect the cable, and you're home free...
However, on my MBP there were two other pesky screws/rubber mounts located on the left side of the drive, which were attached to the framed molding the drive sits in. Problem is, this molding doesn't come off. On that same left side, the molding is fitted underneath the card slot circuitry, adjacent to the top of the drive. There's not a lot of room to work there. Without having some sort of narrow-bend, angled #6 torque driver, this baby didn't look like it was accessible...
I ended up having to remove one torque screw and one very small phillips screw from the front of the molding, located near the latch button. This allowed me to gently pry up the front left corner of this molding to get the front left screw out of the drive. The back left screw was a different story. There's not as much give in this section. I had to go with the gently-pry-up method. It had some give (It's plastic), but I had to be very careful not to snap the thing...
Once I got that last screw out, I put the new drive in, as instructed. However, getting those two left screws back in were a pain. Unless you have a third hand, when you lift up the plastic molding to put the screw back in, you need to try and balance/line up the drive with the holes. Again, this is all pretty snug and tight. If you sneeze while holding up this molding and drive, you could snap the whole thing...
I am by no means an expert. Maybe I'm an idiot and someone has posted a better method for this type of MBP design. I didn't find one. Anyway, I just thought I would share my experience. I know there are some definite model differences between various dates of manufacture. Once again, if I hadn't had this issue, this would have been a 30 minute job. I laid out a piece of large packing tape right-side up on a towel. I laid out all the screws for each removal phase on this tape in rows, marking where they came from on a sheet of paper. Beyond the surprise design issues, it went quite smoothly...
Hope this helps someone...
Blessings,
Craig

A 17" mid 2009 MBP will accept up to 8 GB RAM with the following specifications:  204-pin PC3-8500 (1066 MHz) DDR3 SO-DIMM.  The best sources for Mac compatible RAM are OWC and Crucial.
Any 2.5", 9.5 mm thick SATA HDD/SSD will be compatible with your MBP,  You should have no difficulty in finding a 1 TB HDD for your MBP.  Start your search by examining the selection here:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/
Ciao.

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